Chrome Web Store


The Chrome Web Store is Google's online store for its Chrome web browser. As of 2019, CWS hosts about 190,000 extensions and web apps.

History

CWS was publicly unveiled in December 2010, and was opened on February 11, 2011, with the release of Google Chrome 9.0. A year later it was redesigned to "catalyze a big increase in traffic, across downloads, users, and total number of apps". As of June 2012, there were 750 million total installs of content hosted on CWS.
Some extension developers have sold their extensions to third-parties who then incorporated adware. In 2014, Google removed two such extensions from CWS after many users complained about unwanted pop-up ads. The following year, Google acknowledged that about five percent of visits to its own websites had been altered by extensions with adware.

Malware

remains a problem on CWS. In January 2018, security researchers found four malicious extensions with more than 500,000 combined downloads.
Chrome used to allow extensions hosted on CWS to also be installed at the developer's website for the sake of convenience. But this became a malware vector, so it was removed in 2018.